


Disasters Can Be Romantic Too

by BabylonsFall



Series: Prompts [20]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Bad Cooking, Established Relationship, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Multi, Post-Canon, Romantic Gestures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 07:32:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13476699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabylonsFall/pseuds/BabylonsFall
Summary: Eliotknowshe's walking into a disaster when he gets home and there's smoke coming out of the kitchen.The explanation ought to be good though.





	Disasters Can Be Romantic Too

**Author's Note:**

> So in my last call for soft leverage prompts I was given this: _Would you write Elliot coming home to a full on disaster zone cause Hardison and Parker tried to cook for him? And like Alec tried to go all high tech like in The French Conbection and Parker tried adding chocolate to like a roast or something and then maybe Elliot actually tries to eat it all?_ from [actualplanetpluto](https://actualplanetpluto.tumblr.com), and this is the result!
> 
> There's not as much cooking detail as there probably could've been because my brain is mush when it comes to research right now and I avoid cooking like the plague, so my knowledge base if very limited. But! I still like how it turned out, and I hope you do too!

Eliot knew, if he was quick about it, he could back out of the apartment and close the door quietly enough that neither Hardison nor Parker would even realize he’d been there in the first place. He could make it maybe two blocks out before they realized he was late. He could be safely in his apartment (emergency use only) across town before they started blowing up his phone. And maybe ten minutes after that, he’d have Parker breaking in through the window, and Hardison banging on the door. Still. Might be worth it.

Eyeing the smoke trailing from the kitchen (...he needed to do a double check on the fire alarms apparently if that wasn’t setting them off. Assuming Hardison hadn’t just straight up turned them off. Again), and listening to the panic-tinged shushing and whispering from the same place, he was sorely tempted to leave. And just. Not deal with this.

He knew. He  _ knew  _ his kitchen was destroyed. Hadn’t even seen it yet but all the signs pointed to a lost cause. That he’d be stuck cleaning.

Alright. Well. He’d stayed in the doorway too long to escape now, so, into the fray it was.

His kitchen was probably salvageable, at least, or they would’ve been trying to keep him away from the apartment. He knew  _ that _ from experience. And if they were futzing around in the kitchen, they were probably trying to do something...well, nice. For someone anyway. Last time his kitchen had been destroyed, it had been in an attempt at making a cake for Amy’s birthday. (How they’d gotten burnt frosting on the ceiling...well, there were a couple questions involved there that, now that he was thinking about it, never got answered.) So they were  _ trying _ to be nice, and blowing a gasket about it wasn’t really the right approach. Even if his kitchen  _ was  _ a casualty.

(Yes, he was hung up on that. The kitchen was  _ his  _ space in the apartment, dammit. He was allowed to be a touch protective over it when he was the one that had installed the whole damn thing from the baseboards up. They’d never hear the end of it if him or Parker messed up Hardison’s computers, or if him or Hardison messed with Parker’s rigs so you know what, he could gripe a bit.)

Didn’t mean they wouldn’t be getting an earful though, and a hard ban on them entering the kitchen again anytime soon.

Despite all of that—the rising sense of foreboding, the rough calculation of how much time in the near future would be spent cleaning—he could feel a small smile fighting its way out. Not the best way to avenge his kitchen. So, schooling his expression as best he could, he decided to just. Brave his fate, and slipped over to get a look at the kitchen—where, apparently, Hardison and Parker still hadn’t noticed him coming home.

Leaning in the doorway—or, what counted as one anyway. Really, just the corner around which the open plan kitchen was laid out—arms crossed over his chest, he took in...well. The disaster.

What looked like—what he was praying was—flour dusted the floor and counters, with the stray handprint on the cabinets here and there. There was red-sauce footprints leading around the island, smeared in the white, handprints to match on the counters. The sink was full of dishes with enough staining and burnt warping that he was pretty sure they’re all lost causes. There was a tray of...something, burnt and black and clearly stuck to the metal, resting straight on his counter, a broken casserole dish—clean though—beside it. Something...cheesy? is stuck to the ceiling over the oven (the 12 ft ceiling. What the hell). The smoke is, thankfully, not coming from any food, but actually from what Eliot recognizes as Hardison’s prized culinary laser. (And maybe he was a little gleeful about the apparent death of that thing. Just a bit.)

And Hardison and Parker are there, standing in front of the oven, still oblivious to him, watching something boil on the oven with increasingly panicked looks.

“...So. What’s the occasion?” It takes a heroic effort to keep a straight, disinterested face when two of the world’s best thieves literally jump off the ground and spin around, giving him expressions he was more used to seeing on startled children caught with their hands in cookie jars, or your given forbidden sugar hiding spot.

“Uh-” Parker starts.

“Erm-” Hardison pipes up at the same time. Both stop, blinking at each other, then back at him.

He didn’t say anything, waiting them out.

Parker broke first, oddly enough, “...we wanted to make dinner.” Is the almost petulant reply, and Eliot has to bite back a grin. Hard.

“Okay? Any particular reason why?” He asks, genuinely curious. These two never did anything like this without  _ some  _ kind of reason. Too slow (and frustrating sometimes) for Parker, too structured for Hardison—unless he managed to sneak in the lasers and his molecular gastronomy.

Hardison this time (though Eliot sees the elbow Parker throws into his side, which he doesn’t really think is fair) “Ah, well...it’s. Been a year, yeah?” Eliot blinked at him, actually lost this time. A year? Since what?

Parker and Hardison’s anniversary was in the summer, not for another two months. The anniversary of all three of them was four months after  _ that _ . Eliot had the dates memorized, and plans he was already working on for both of them. So it wasn’t either of those. The only other big event he could think of was Nate and Sophie’s wedding anniversary but...no, that was in August.

He wasn’t sure how much of his confusion is showing on his face, but Parker was frowning, and Hardison was blinking at him owlishly, so he shrugged, “Since…?” he prompted.

“Since we first actually talked about there being an us, silly.” Is what Parker finally explains, and Eliot was...kind of floored.

It wasn’t that he didn’t remember that day, now that they’d pointed it out. It was one of the most awkward days of his life—beating out senior prom night and  _ that  _ was an accomplishment in and of itself—for all that they could laugh about it now. It hadn’t been fair, not in the least, with the two of them cornering him while he was stranded on the couch with a busted knee, both of them talking a million miles a minute about how they wanted to turn a  _ them  _ into an  _ us _ , and he’d honestly thought they’d been...well, not  _ lying _ since they couldn’t be that cruel, not to him, but certainly...confused. Or moving too fast maybe. It had taken them a good six months after that to convince him that they were sure, they weren’t rushing, and for heaven’s sake, to just  _ kiss them already. _

(If he could go back a year to smack himself over the head, he would in a heartbeat.)

“...Oh.” Is what he managed to say, and maybe it came out too soft or too small, he didn’t know, but Hardison’s expression goes soft, and Parker was smiling that small, delighted little thing she got when she knew she did something right.

Leave it to them to turn a literal disaster into one of the sweetest things he could’ve thought of. Because this  _ was _ incredibly sweet, poor execution aside. It wasn’t a day he’d consider a...a  _ good  _ thing, especially with how snappy he’d been in the week after, but for them? He could see why they would. Parker screwing up the courage to lay her feelings bare, Hardison risking a rejection none of them were quite sure he could take well—and the start of Eliot getting his head out of his ass. If they hadn’t said anything that day, there was a good chance they’d all still be fumbling around each other.

“...Your pot is boiling over.” It was a cheap shot, sure, but it got them to snap their heads around so he can scrub at his face—either his eyes or his cheeks, he wasn’t sure, because he was definitely blushing, and the pricking at his eyes was offensive to say the least—so he’d take it.

* * *

The pasta had been boiled to mush. The chicken had been somehow almost raw inside, and black on the outside. They had managed to burn the red-sauce, the garlic in it ending up bitter and overpowering. They wouldn’t even tell him what they tried to cook the first three attempts—though he heard Parker mutter something about chocolate and Hardison lament some olives, so it was probably for the best. For the sake of their stomachs, they couldn’t eat much of it, but Eliot did make sure to at least try everything, if only to see Parker smile soft and small, and Hardison flush with pride and grin bright. But, they end up taking pity on him (and themselves) and they call out to their favorite Italian place—the one that only delivered to them thanks to an impromptu job they ran last year that ended up saving the place from closing.

Hardison and Parker cleaned up what could be easily wiped down or thrown away before promising Eliot that they’d clean the rest tomorrow. It took  a lot of willpower, but Eliot was willing to let it lie. For now. As long as the light stayed off so he couldn’t see it, and as long as they actually kept their word. He knew they meant well, but they both had horrible attention spans for things like that, and there was about a fifty-fifty chance they were going to forget.

(Shame he couldn’t even be mad about the idea.)

Hardison and Parker ended up perched on the couch, Eliot on the floor between their knees. Everything was kind of hitting him hard—how these two amazing, sweet, absolute disasters were  _ his _ and he was  _ theirs _ , and a year ago, this was completely beyond his wildest dreams and...and well, everything), and it was easier to have them at his back like that, than to deal with both of them pressed in close and warm and just  _ there _ . They get it by now—had talked about it only once, and all it had taken was Eliot telling them that he felt safer with them watching his back so he could bend a little, relax just that bit, for them to settle in without a word.

There was empty plates on the table in front of them, some geeky movie on the tv that Hardison had been insisting they watch—and he’s still not sure how the man hasn’t caught on that Eliot and Parker only put up as much resistance as they do to get him fired up and telling them all about it anyway, since there’s nothing more beautiful than Hardison diving into something he enjoys with all the passion his large frame can handle. Parker’s knee is braced at his back between his shoulders—a comforting, solid weight he couldn’t help but lean back against—while Hardison’s hand was curled in his hair, where Eliot would be pretty sure he’d forgotten about it if he didn’t occasionally drag his fingers through in a way that had Eliot straight up melting.

Far as disasters went, Eliot had to admit. This one had turned out just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments and kudos are always loved!
> 
> Come yell about leverage with me on [tumblr](https://distinctivelibrarians.tumblr.com)!


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